(BQ) Part 2 book "Essentials of marketing" has contents: Personal selling and customer service, advertising and sales promotion, publicity- promotion using earned media, owned media, and social media, pricing objectives and policies, price setting in the business world,.and other contents. | 12 C H A P T E R T W E LV E © imageBROKER/Alamy. Retailers, Wholesalers, and Their Strategy Planning From 1843 to 1855 Rowland Hussey Macy opened—and closed—four general stores that specialized in “dry goods,” mainly textiles and ready-to-wear clothing. Learning from those early failures, Macy finally hit on a formula that worked with the . Macy Dry Goods store he opened in New York City in 1858. Macy was soon adding departments with new product lines and moving into nearby buildings. Resembling a collection of specialty shops, Macy’s became one of the world’s first department stores. Innovative from the start, Macy’s was the first store to offer visits with Santa Claus. It also led the way in illuminating window displays to lure customers into its stores. In 1902, the original store moved uptown to Herald Square, where it remains today as the flagship in the 800+ store Macy’s chain. Department stores proved to be popular with American shoppers; the concept was in the growth stage of its life c ycle for more than a century before sales topped out in the 1970s. Department stores’ large product assortment and attentive customer service appealed to many customers. Typically located in city centers or regional malls, department stores pulled customers from a wide geographic area. In the early 1900s, Sears and Marshall Field’s branched out with mail-order catalogs and brought the department store to rural America. In the 1970s, department stores began to lose market share; first to mass-merchandisers and later to supercenters such as Target and Walmart, which o ffered convenient neighborhood locations and lower prices. To compete, department stores pushed sale prices, but profits declined and customer service suffered. Many thought the arrival of Internet retailing in the late 1990s signaled the death knell for department stores. But some department stores successfully adapted their marketing mixes, making them .
